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Via Crucis

Introduction

Lukaszewski’s Way of the Cross is one Station longer than Liszt’s or Dupré’s. This reflects the Catholic Church’s more recent embracing of a final, 15th Station for the empty tomb and resurrection—an addition that brings redemptive ‘closure’ to the Paschal story on Easter Sunday. Lukaszewski employs the 15 Stations as a rigorous structural framework, so that the 55-minute span of the work evolves, he says, ‘in the manner of a mega-rondo’.

Repetition, from one Station to the next, is central to the work’s culminatory, ritual power. Every Station, except the last, features a highly calculated sequence of recurring motifs and refrains. They define themselves most of all by textural separation—solo/choral, upper/lower voices, a cappella/instrumental—but also by tempo relationships and contrasts of mood.

Each Station is announced by solemn, three-part writing for male voices: austere, parallel fourths (one perfect, one augmented) making for a consciously archaic effect—aggressive even, as if the singers are Pilate’s strutting centurions. This stern pronouncement melts into a supplicatory Adoramus te for sopranos and altos, each time accompanied by a four-part trombone chorus of low-voiced parallel fifths.

In successive Stations, narrative passages for the three solo voices and the narrator, speaking in Latin, follow. Lukaszewski ‘colour-codes’ each solo part. The Evangelist part, written for a particularly high-lying countertenor voice, is always doubled by a bass clarinet. The tenor part, that of Pilatus, is tracked by the contrabassoon at the octave or double octave. And the bass/Christus part is always differentiated texturally with a doubling by the alto flute. With simple but effective symbolism, at the moment in the 12th Station when Christus bows his head (‘Consummatum est’—‘It is finished’), the alto flute carries on playing alone. Musically, the soul has left the body.

The final recurring component of each Station features a lamentation for upper voices and low strings, Qui passus est pro nobis—a more reflective, but equally austere counterpart to the opening refrain for male voices. There then follows a bridge passage between each Station for the woodwind quartet and sustained, droning fifths in the horns and lower strings. This recurring passage, based on a Polish folk tune and with medieval-like hocketing effects in the wind writing, is comparable to the Promenade sections in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Here is a neutral space for the listener, free of text and voices, where Lukaszewski leads us on to the next Station. These ‘amorphic inter-Station passages’, the composer writes, enact ‘the reset function’. What is different from the other repeated materials in Via Crucis is the way Lukaszewski gradually winds down the tempo of each successive re-appearance. The first time it appears, we hear an alert, springing dance, marked Allegro, crotchet=120. With its last appearance, at the end of the 13th Station, we hear a mournful dirge, crotchet=40–46.

Lukaszewski adjusts tempo and dynamics with one final, crucial element of each Station. In the first two or three, it is not apparent. By the fourth, firm, tutti chords begin to register with the listener, because their number relates to the number of the Station. They precede each of the male-voice Station announcements, ever more dominating. They are block-like blows of the hammer, and Lukaszewski cranks up the tempo from Grave, crotchet=40/50 at the start to Moderato, crotchet=90 at Station 12. For the final two Stations, though, we are back to the Grave tempo, and the iterations of this chord, in Christ’s death, have lost their loud insistence.

Lukaszewski guides us through the story further, musically, in Stations 3, 7 and 9. These are the three Stations where Jesus falls, so the hammer blow chords are followed uniquely by snarling, snapped, brass-heavy diminished fifths—one of them in Station 3, two in 7, three in 9. These are musical signposts for subsequent differences in each Station; here the messianic prophecy from Isaiah Chapter 53 offers a presentiment of the suffering of the Via Crucis. These passages are uniquely for a cappella voices, and extend the overall range of the choral writing with solo invocations amidst a wash of sustained, eight-part clusters.

A similar, clustered wash of sound is achieved in the longest Station, the 12th, when woodwinds and brass swap their instruments for ocarinas. Eerie and disembodied, and markedly different from the more firmly pitched ocarina chorales in the second movement of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Lukaszewski prepares the way with haunting eloquence for Christ’s death.

The 14th Station omits choir or soloists, and features instead the most extended passage for spoken-voice narrator. The solemn cor anglais solo that weaves through these words is a Polish Christmas lullaby, Jezus malusienki—a quotation that symbolizes, Lukaszewski writes, ‘the birth to new life after the death of the body’.

Arvo Pärt, in his setting of the St John Passion, takes the listener on an ever so tightly controlled, unwavering journey of tonal and textural experience. After 65 minutes of calculated sparseness around A minor, the effect of his final chorus, blazing into D major, can be monumentally liberating. Lukaszewski does something similar with his 15th Station for the Resurrection, though he is hugely more expansive with his material both at that point, and with everything that has preceded it.

With almost cinematic vividness, the choir treads at first warily, then ever-more surely towards the light of Christ’s resurrection. The horns, at last liberated from their almost constant drones of paired fifths, lead the way to each new chord with a Bruckner-like sense of harmonic impetus. And then Lukaszewski gives us the cataclysmic release of C major, the chord of resurrection in Polish liturgy on Easter Sunday. This is led by the organ—tutta la forza, and until this point silent in the tension and sadness of the Passion story. Choir and organ lead the way from here to a reprise of the opening—this time with Christ in victory and majesty, and with a final, ecstatic chord bursting with the ambiguity of major and minor.

Recordings

Lukaszewski’s choral works was widely praised by listeners entranced by the composer’s unique yet accessible musical language. For this new release Layton and Polyphony, together with the Britten Sinfonia and a team of world-class soloists, have t ...» More

Why, what evil has he done?
I have found no cause of death in him:
I will therefore chastise him, and let him go.

And they persisted with loud voices,
demanding that he be crucified.
And their voices grew in strength.
And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required.
And he released him to them that for sedition
and murder was cast into prison,
whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.

Who has believed our report?
And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant,
and as a root out of a dry ground:
he has no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him,
there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:
and we hid as it were our faces from him;
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Behold, he is set for the fall
and rising again of many in Israel;
and for a sign which shall be spoken against;
and a sword shall pierce through your own soul also
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

You are sad and tearful, Virgin Mary!
For in the passion of the Christ
a sword of misery has pierced your soul.

Part 10: Station 5: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the Cross
Jesus a Simone Cyrenaeo

Surely he has borne our griefs,
and carried our sorrows:
yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed.

You who died for us,
Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Part 16: Station 8: The women of Jerusalem weep for Jesus
Mulieres Jesum Christum

And there followed him
a great company of people, and of women,
who also bewailed and lamented him.

But Jesus turning to them said,

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me,
but weep for yourselves, and for your children.
For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say,
Blessed are the barren, and the wombs
that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
Then shall they begin to say to the mountains,
Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.
For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

You who died for us,
Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Part 18: Station 9: Jesus falls the third time
Jesus Christus sub Cruce tertium cecidit

All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He appeared as he chose to,
yet he opened not his mouth:
he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb,
so he openeth not his mouth.

Then the soldiers, when they had crucified him,
took his garments (and made four parts,
every soldier a part); and also his coat.
Now the coat was without seam,
woven from the top throughout.
They said therefore among themselves,
Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be.
That the Scripture might be fulfilled, which said,
They parted my raiment among them,
and for my vesture they did cast lots.
These things therefore the soldiers did.

You who died for us,
Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Part 22: Station 11: Jesus is nailed to the Cross
Cruciatores Jesum Christum crucifigaverunt

And they bring him to the place Golgotha,
which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.
And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh:
but he received it not.
And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.
And the superscription of his accusation was written over,
THE KING OF THE JEWS.
And with him they crucify two thieves;
the one on his right hand, and the other on his left.
And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith,
And he was numbered with the transgressors.

You who died for us,
Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Part 24: Station 12: Jesus dies on the Cross
Jesus Christus in Cruce mortuus est

The Jews therefore (because it was the preparation)
that the bodies should not remain upon the Cross on the sabbath day
(for that sabbath day was a high day),
besought Pilate that their legs might be broken,
and that they might be taken away.
Then came the soldiers,
and broke the legs of the first,
and of the other which was crucified with him.

But when they came to Jesus,
and saw that he was dead already, they did not break his legs:
but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side,
and forthwith came there out blood and water.

You who died for us,
Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Part 28: Station 14: Jesus is laid in the tomb
Corpus Christi sepulchro conditum est

And after this Joseph of Arimathaea
(being a disciple of Jesus,
but secretly for fear of the Jews)
besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus.
And there came also Nicodemus,
which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture
of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound weight.
Then they took the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes
with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.
Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden;
and in the garden a new sepulchre,
wherein was never man yet laid.
There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews’ preparation day;
for the sepulchre was nigh at hand.

The first day of the week came Mary Magdalene early,
when it was yet dark, to the sepulchre,
and saw the stone taken away from the sepulchre.
Then she ran, and came to Simon Peter,
and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved,
and said unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre,
and we know not where they have laid him.

On the third day the Victor over death rises.

Jesu, to you be glory,
you who died for your servants,
with the Father and the nourishing Spirit,
for an age of ages.